#story of the movie is not real btw it’s based on a book

[sunkissedfawn]

Moore: What are you reading that’s so fascinating? The Bible?

Lewis: Yes. Have you read it?

Moore: It’s been quoted at me.

Lewis: It’s often a weapon, isn’t it?—

Moore: You don't really believe all of that, do you? That they were real?

Lewis: I believe it doesn't really matter what I think.

Moore: That's a relief, 'cause I'm sure it says right there that man should not be alone.

[infizero]

Why Ambrosius and Ballister’s Relationship Feels So Different in the Movie (Nimona)

As someone who read Nimona countless times growing up, I am very familiar with the story and these characters. Which is why when I watched the movie, I was struck by how different Ambrosius and Ballister felt. They seemed like totally different and unfamiliar characters to me, and it didn’t have anything to do with their designs.

After rereading the original Nimona graphic novel recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that the main reason they feel like completely different characters in the movie comes down to one thing: the removal of the joust.

When I watched the movie, I was surprised by the fact that they changed the circumstances that drove these two apart. But it didn’t hit me just how much this one event shapes both of their characters and their relationship to each other until I reread the book. 

The joust is CRUCIAL to their dynamic. It pervades every interaction they have with each other, they bring it up constantly, it is literally the crux of their collective storyline. We learn about it on PAGE 5 of the whole book, and their big heart-to-heart when Ballister is captured near the climax of the story is based around Ambrosius finally admitting the truth about what happened. Honestly I’d say that him finally coming to terms with what he did and apologizing for it is probably what allowed these two to finally find peace together by the end of the book.

We get something similar to it in the movie. Ambrosius still is responsible for Ballister losing his arm, but it is under WILDLY different circumstances. So I want to talk about how the joust affects them in the book, and then explain why the movie’s version of events, while similar on the surface, has a completely different effect on everything. So let’s get into it!

(All images of the book are via pictures of my own physical copy btw, so apologies if they’re not the best quality.)

(Also I want to make it clear that I don’t hate the movie nor its adaptation of these two. I do personally greatly prefer the book, but this post is not here to tear down the movie and exclaim that the book was way better. I just find it interesting how changing one event can have huge ripple effects!)

Part 1: The Graphic Novel (AKA: “My Boyfriend Shot Off My Arm Because of His Wild Ambition!”)

Like I said before, we learn about the joust very early on; Chapter 2, page 5. It is told to us first via Ballister’s perspective. Nimona asks if she can kill Ambrosius while they’re making evil plans, and Ballister says no -- if anyone is going to kill Ambrosius, it’s going to be him. We then get a flashback to the joust itself.

Ballister explains how they were friends and how the joust was the first time they had been pitted against each other. Ballister won fair and square, but in his words:

BALLISTER: “but Ambrosius hates to lose.”

BALLISTER: “He always claimed it was an accident. No one could prove otherwise.”

BALLISTER: “Turns out the Institution had no use for a one-armed hero. I took the only other viable option.”

Ambrosius used a weaponized lance and blasted Ballister’s arm off. After the incident, Ballister was rejected by the Institution, and became a villain instead of the hero he had originally set out to be.

In Chapter 3 we see Ambrosius appear for the first time, and he and Ballister have a very relaxed sort of cartoon hero-villain dynamic going on. There’s definitely real animosity between them, but they don’t hesitate to simply talk casually to each other or help each other when things go south. It’s all pretty lighthearted and lowkey. 

They fight briefly, but after Nimona triggers the building they’re in to self-destruct, Ambrosius doesn’t hesitate to help Ballister escape and Ballister doesn’t hesitate to accept his help. Ambrosius even tries to reassure him that Nimona will be fine. After they make it out, with Nimona presumed dead, Ambrosius puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him to go before more guards show up. They may be “arch-nemesises”, but they certainly don’t act like it.

AMBROSIUS: “Haven’t you missed our fights? We haven’t done this since you tried to clone the king’s daughter!”

BALLISTER: “Ambrosius, I really don’t have time for this.”

AMBROSIUS: “Are you trying to make me jealous?”

BALLISTER: “You’re an idiot.”

By the way, I’m not going to be doing a full breakdown of every single scene with them, don’t worry. I just think that their first interaction shows off their dynamic very well. This is presumably how they’ve been with each other since the incident, as it’s made clear both here and throughout the book that they’ve both been doing this for a while at this point. They have a very established dynamic, which is important as that is one of the big differences between the book and the movie. (I’ll get into that more later.)

Whenever these two interact throughout the book, it’s clear that they have very different opinions on the incident that drove them apart and how their relationship functions now.

Ambrosius tries to act like it was simply an accident and that it doesn’t matter. Ballister became a villain of his own volition, and now they are arch-nemesises who have to fight because that’s their job -- though he doesn’t exactly act like he hates Ballister. 

Meanwhile Ballister saw it as a deep betrayal, and while he definitely still cares deeply about Ambrosius, he cannot get over the incident as easily as Ambrosius can.

Their respective feelings about what happened are shown perfectly in the scene in Chapter 7 where Ambrosius invites Ballister to meet with him in secret. Ambrosius tells him that the Institution has ordered him to kill Nimona and begs him to send her away, both so he doesn’t have to kill her and so things can go back to “normal.” Ballister then says that Ambrosius gave up normal at the joust.

AMBROSIUS: “I can’t believe you’re still hung up about that. It was a long time ago, you know.”

AMBROSIUS: “Besides, it was an ACCIDENT.”

BALLISTER: “I bet you’ve said that so many times you’ve started to actually believe it.”

Ambrosius insists it was an accident, and Ballister claims that he blasted off his arm because he couldn’t stand that Ballister was better than him. This sets Ambrosius off and they begin to argue.

AMBROSIUS: “You can’t blame me for how your life turned out! You made the choice to turn evil!”

BALLISTER: “Choice? I never had a choice! The Institution needed a villain. That lot fell to me. I never chose it.”

BALLISTER “And it could just as easily have been you, had that “accident” happened differently!”

AMBROSIUS: “Oh please! Do you really believe that?”

AMBROSIUS: “You never had it in you to be a hero! Everyone always knew that you were going to be the one to go bad!”

Ambrosius has convinced himself that Ballister chose to become evil, and that he isn’t responsible for what happened because it was an accident. We later learn that it wasn’t an accident though, which means that this really is him just making excuses so he doesn’t have to accept responsibility.

Ballister brings up the idea of Ambrosius becoming like him again after they fight, in one of if not my favorite scene between them in the whole book:

AMBROSIUS: “uugghh”

BALLISTER: “What if I cut off your arm right now?”

BALLISTER: “Then you’d see how fast the Institution would cast you aside. Just like they did me.”

AMBROSIUS: “You wouldn’t.”

BALLISTER: “No, I wouldn’t.”

BALLISTER: “And I’m the villain.”

BALLISTER: “What do you suppose that says about you?”

Ballister and Ambrosius are both very complicated individuals, and I think they lose a lot of their moral grayness in the movie. (Which I will get to later.) 

Ambrosius is the “hero”, but it was his ambition that drove him to blast Ballister’s arm off, and he’s never accepted responsibility for it, instead trying to convince himself that Ballister turned out this way because of his own actions. But he doesn’t disagree here that the Institution would throw him out if he were to lose his own arm, which I think is very telling. He knows deep down that he is not a good person, and he is not working for good people. But he doesn’t want to admit it.

Ballister is the “villain”, but in many ways he is better than Ambrosius. He abides by his own rules of never killing unless it’s necessary, and goes out of his way throughout the book to make sure that as few people are harmed as possible. He knows that the Institution is corrupt, because he was one of the people it failed. And he works to try and bring it down. 

Ambrosius cannot accept what happened, and because of that they aren’t able to get anywhere. They both know it wasn’t an accident. But because Ambrosius cannot admit it, they are stuck like this.

It’s a fascinating part of Ambrosius’ character that though he is adamant about Ballister being the one to destroy himself, he still cares about him. Much more openly than Ballister does in return, in fact. Ambrosius consistently does whatever he can to avoid having to kill him and always seems to have his wellbeing in mind. While he initially refused to kill Nimona, revolted at the idea that he should be ordered to kill “a little girl”, he eventually agrees to do so, but only under the condition that Ballister would be spared.

THE DIRECTOR: “Your motivations are quite transparent. I KNOW what the nature of your relationship was. I made it clear at the time that I disapproved. If your fixation on him has impeded your ability to do your job, then he truly has outlived his usefulness.”

THE DIRECTOR: “We’ll find you a new nemesis. Perhaps you will be more competent without Blackheart as a distraction.”

AMBROSIUS: “I won’t kill him. If you demand I kill the girl, I’ll do it - but I won’t kill him.”

Despite him and Ballister’s separation being his fault, he is the one who wishes most for things to go back to the way they were.  And this is likely why he refuses to accept responsibility about the joust. If it were truly an accident, then there shouldn’t be anything preventing them from continuing to be together. By painting it as an accident, Ballister becomes the villain for refusing to move on and let things go back to the way they were, not Ambrosius.

But finally, after Nimona disappears and Ballister lets himself be captured, we get probably the most important scene between these two. Ambrosius has been demoted due to his failure to kill Nimona, and is now forced to guard Ballister’s cell. Ambrosius is at his lowest that he’s been throughout the story, disgraced and discarded by the Institution who he had always been so loyal to.

It’s notable that Ambrosius says here that they both know Ballister is not evil, since he has been paddling that idea this whole time that Ballister made the choice to turn evil. By admitting that he is not, it shows that he is both starting to turn against the Institution, and starting to be more honest about what really happened.

Naturally, after Ambrosius wonders how things ended up like this and reminisces on when they were together, Ballister once again brings up the joust. And finally...

AMBROSIUS: “I- I never wanted to hurt you. I- I didn’t- It was-”

BALLISTER: “Don’t you dare try to tell me again that it was an accident.”

AMBROSIUS: “It wasn’t.”

...he admits the truth.

Ambrosius shares his side of the story, letting both us and Ballister in on what really happened that day. It wasn’t fully his fault -- the Director had called him into her office the night before the joust and told him that he had promise, that he was her choice out of the two, but that he had to prove himself against Ballister or that opportunity would go away.

On the day of the joust, Ambrosius received a weaponized lance instead of his regular one, which he instantly noticed. He asked what the Director expected him to do with it, and was told that she expected him to win.

To Ambrosius’ credit, he had no intention of using it, as he was confident that he would win. But the weight from the weaponized lance threw his balance off, and he ending up losing. And so...

AMBROSIUS: “I wanted it, more than anything. You never wanted it as much as me. You were just BETTER, without hardly even seeming to try.”

AMBROSIUS: “I don’t even remember- but I must have-”

[...]

AMBROSIUS: “I’m sorry, Ballister. I’m so sorry.”

To be fair, Ambrosius is not entirely to blame here. I doubt he would’ve come up with this idea on his own; he only acted on it because the Director had already given him the weaponized lance, and stressed the night before that the opportunities she dangled in front of him would not be given to him if he did not win. He was manipulated.

But he still made the decision to do it. He could’ve simply not used the lance. But he chose to. It is his fault.

It’s fascinating that the version of events Ambrosius had been swearing by this entire time is the exact opposite of what really happened. He claimed that it was an accident, he didn’t choose to do it, he had no choice, and that it was Ballister’s choice to become evil that caused all of this. But in reality, Ambrosius was the only one who got a choice here. And that choice is why their relationship was destroyed.

Ballister then brings attention to something even more damning:

BALLISTER: “You’ve never said it before.”

AMBROSIUS: “What?”

BALLISTER: “You never said you were sorry.”

AMBROSIUS: “I- didn’t?”

AMBROSIUS: “Oh god.”

I feel like you could interpret this in a lot of different ways, but the way I see it, they probably didn’t see each other much right after the incident. Ambrosius was catapulted into stardom as the kingdom’s beloved knight, and Ballister became a villain. I don’t think they really interacted much until their hero-villain antics started up, so I don’t think Ambrosius really had a chance to apologize. And if he did, he didn’t think to. Regardless of why, I do think it is messed up that he never apologized, and it goes to show just how much this event destroyed the bond they used to have.

From here, there’s not too much, as Plot Stuff starts getting serious around this point. Ambrosius ends up betraying the Institution after they continuously attack Ballister to provoke Nimona, attacking the guards who are holding him. This is when Ambrosius finally chooses Ballister over the Institution, which is great for his character, but there’s not really much more than that to say about it.

He and Ballister plan together to try and save the kingdom, with Ambrosius being adamant that they have to kill Nimona while Ballister refuses to. It’s during this conversation that Ambrosius mentions that he “never did anything good [his] whole life”, which is really sad but also kind of accurate, and it goes to show how he’s finally accepted responsibility for everything he’s done and had a part in up to this point.

Eventually Ballister is able to find a way to nerf her and they split up, with Ambrosius wanting to tell him something in case they don’t see each other again, but Ballister shuts him down.

BALLISTER: “We can’t do this now. Just... just promise me you won’t get yourself killed.”

It’s easy to assume this was something romantic and it likely was, but I imagine Ambrosius could’ve also wanted to say sorry again for everything. Perhaps it would’ve been a mix of both.

Regardless, they split up and climax stuff happens: Ambrosius attempts to kill Nimona but gets seriously injured, Ballister tries to reason with Nimona, etc. etc. Eventually at the very end, we see that these two have made peace and are together again, living on after everything. And that’s these two in the book!

Whew. I know that was a lot, but don’t worry. I won’t be going into as much detail about the movie’s version of events, as Ambrosius and Ballister have a much more cut-and-dry dynamic there than in the book. Their relationship in the original is very complex, so I wanted to make sure I covered all of those little nuances.

The joust is what defines their relationship and a lot of their respective characters; it is unimaginably important. Ballister became a villain because he lost his arm and was cast aside by the Institution. Ambrosius became the kingdom’s hero because he took Ballister out of the picture. They are unable to be around each other normally for very long because of their divided views of what happened. It is only after Ambrosius finally faces the truth that they are able to find peace together once more.

All of this is to say that it’s extremely hard to imagine what their relationship would be like in the graphic novel had the joust not happened the way it did. Which brings us to...

Part 2: The Movie (AKA: “My Boyfriend Sliced Off My Arm Because I Literally Killed Someone!”)

Before we start, I want to again stress that I am not trying to argue that any changes made here are inherently inferior. I am merely pointing out the differences between the book and the movie that contribute to the overall dissonance I and many others have felt when it comes to these two across versions.

Right off the bat, we are greeted with the movie’s version of Ambrosius and Ballister’s backstory. Like was implied in the book, they appear to be together (or something along those lines) which is great to actually see. But it quickly becomes clear that the events here are far different.

Instead of a joust, it is a knighting ceremony. There is no competition between Ballister and Ambrosius here. Ambrosius is knighted and cheered for, and then it is Ballister’s turn. He is knighted and everyone is silent before breaking into cheers as well. And then...

...his sword suddenly turns into a cannon and kills the queen. And in retaliation...

...Ambrosius chops his arm off.

Now if you’ve listened to ANYTHING I’ve said so far, this should immediately set off alarm bells. Because this one little difference changes everything about these two’s dynamic.

In the book, Ambrosius shot off Ballister’s arm in order to win his position. It was an entirely selfish and evil action spurred on only by his uncontrollable want to be the winner.

But here, Ambrosius is debatably justified in his response. Sure, he didn’t have to be as drastic as slicing his whole arm off (and I know there’s symbolism there with how the kingdom has taught people to get rid of problems), but Ballister -- to him -- literally just shot the queen. The queen who Ambrosius has sworn to protect. It is completely reasonable for him to respond in this way. And that’s a huge difference.

By changing this, we already have a completely different situation. Ambrosius here didn’t particularly want to cut Ballister’s arm off, it was a reflex, a response to a sudden danger. (Not saying he wanted to in the book, but there he made the deliberate decision to do so. In the movie it seems much more like an actual accident -- an overreaction that he immediately regrets and, as we’ll see, continues to regret.) And there was justification for it. There was no justification for it in the book. 

Instead of an Ambrosius whose ambition caused him to commit an evil act of betrayal against the man he was closest to, we now have an Ambrosius who, in the heat of the moment, overreacted like he was trained to after Ballister seemingly betrayed him. We’ll see over the course of the movie how this affects things, but that’s not the only major change here.

As we figure out shortly afterward, the movie makes a huge change when it comes to how the story functions, and that’s the timeline of events. In the book, the joust and the subsequent fallout between Ballister and Ambrosius happened years ago. We don’t know how long, but it’s clearly been a while. Enough time has passed where they are fully settled into their roles as hero and villain, and they look significantly younger in the flashbacks as well.

Like previously stated, book Ballister has been a villain for a while. He is completely settled into this role and has been making schemes and having fights of the week with Ambrosius for a considerable time. He knows what he’s doing. He has his own way of doing things, and when Nimona inserts herself into his life much of their early dynamic is him teaching her how he does things. In the book, Ballister is the teacher, Nimona is the student.

But in the movie, this incident just happened. It's unclear how exactly long it's been, but judging from Ballister's arm being created and his wounds healing it's probably been around a month.

Regardless of exactly how long it's been, the point is that these events are still very fresh. Ballister seemingly has just been laying low, not villain-ing it up, and he and Ambrosius haven't seen each other since the knighting ceremony. This changes literally everything about Ballister’s character. This post is specifically about Ambrosius and Ballister’s dynamic and not a Ballister character analysis so I’ll try to keep it brief, but movie Ballister seriously could not be more different from the book.

Compare this to movie Ballister, who I’m pretty sure never knows what he’s doing ever, at any point. He was training to be a knight. He has seemingly never once questioned the Institution. Now he has suddenly lost his arm and been thrust out into the unknown of being treated as a villain, and he has no idea how to handle it. Then Nimona shows up, tells him “hey, the Institution sucks”, and eventually he ends up believing so as well. In the movie, Nimona is the teacher, Ballister is the student.

Book Ballister actively resents the Institution and has no doubts that what they did to him is wrong. He has been plotting their downfall for a while. Nimona, on the other hand, seems to be out of the loop when it comes to the Institution and seemingly only starts hating them after she finds out how they threw Ballister out. Again, I’d just like to stress how completely and totally opposite their dynamic in the movie is compared to this.

There’s also Ballister being a scientist and being much more jaded in the book, but that’s not really important for the purposes of this post. So alas, I shall move on.

This different timeframe greatly impacts Ambrosius and Ballister’s dynamic, and obviously it would. There is a huge difference between a falling-out that happened years ago and you’re both still bitter about, and a falling-out that happened very recently. This, along with the different course of events resulting in said falling-out, is what causes their dynamic to feel so alien.

Also while talking about their early interactions in the movie, I’d just like to point out that while here Nimona is the one to assume Ambrosius is Ballister’s arch-nemesis and call him such, which Ballister doesn’t agree with, they were actually arch-nemeses in the book. Just something I noticed.

Something else I find interesting is later on, Ballister seems to be almost in disbelief about Ambrosius cutting off his arm and makes excuses for him.

BALLISTER: “He didn’t cut off my arm. He disarmed a weapon.”

BALLISTER: “It’s how we were trained.”

(Side note, but I wonder if book Ballister ever felt this way right after the joust? Did he try to convince himself it was an accident too, once upon a time? Did he try to make excuses?)

And to be fair, he is sort of right. Like I said before, Ambrosius’ reaction to Ballister seemingly killing the queen was debatably justified. While we’re obviously supposed to side with Nimona here and agree that Ballister should be more upset at Ambrosius for what he did, the movie definitely paints Ambrosius as more sympathetic overall. We see him freaking out internally about cutting off Ballister’s arm, and there is a lot of emphasis placed on how he and the others were trained by the Institution, inviting the audience to place more of the blame on the system that taught Ambrosius to act this way rather than him as a person.

And again, I’m not saying this is a bad thing! I love a good "taking down a corrupt system” story, and with the different circumstances of the movie it definitely makes more sense to play it this way. But in comparison to the book, Ambrosius is much easier to sympathize with. His character is changed from a very morally gray person who did something horrible and won’t admit it, to a pretty okay person who did something horrible and wholly accepts and bemoans that fact. He’s almost the opposite of what he was in the book.

So we have an Ambrosius who accepts what he did to Ballister and feels awful about it, and a Ballister who has no idea what he’s doing and is basically just being dragged around by Nimona. With both of them being basically the complete opposite of how they were in the book, is it any wonder that their relationship with each other feels so different when they themselves are so different?

Also, once again, the circumstances are very different. There is no Queen murder plot in the book, nor is their any attempt to clear Ballister’s name. A significantly different setting makes a difference too.

I don’t see a need to go into further detail about specific scenes in the movie as I think I’ve made my point clear. But going back to the movie’s lack of Ambrosius and Ballister’s already established hero-villain dynamic, I think these differences are made quite apparent just contrasting how they talk to each other. I mean, just compare these two scenes:

AMBROSIUS: “What? You’re gonna kill me now too?”

BALLISTER: “You believe that?”

BALLISTER: “Then you never knew me at all.”

AMBROSIUS: “uugghh”

BALLISTER: “What if I cut off your arm right now?”

BALLISTER: “Then you’d see how fast the Institution would cast you aside. Just like they did me.”

AMBROSIUS: “You wouldn’t.”

BALLISTER: “No, I wouldn’t.”

BALLISTER: “And I’m the villain.”

BALLISTER: “What do you suppose that says about you?”

Their relationship in the movie is much softer and healthier than it was in the book. Their dialogue in the movie tends to lean much more towards tried-and-true “friendship betrayal” stuff; the wound of Ballister’s “betrayal” may be fresher, but it’s clear both of them love each other far more than they resent each other. In the book, it is the opposite. The movie could NEVER have the bar fight scene. It’s too ugly and bitter to fit these softer versions of Ambrosius and Ballister.

Part 3: Conclusion

So, that was a lot. I hope it’s a little clearer now how big the differences are between these two’s dynamic in the book and the movie! Especially if you’re someone who is only familiar with one or the other. While I prefer the book due to me tending to prefer more complex and messy relationship dynamics, I totally understand the appeal of the more loving and healthy relationship Ambrosius and Ballister have in the movie.

To summarize, here are some of the main takeaways:

Ambrosius causing Ballister to lose his arm is completely unjustified in the book and happens due to Ambrosius’ wild ambition, while in the movie it is a debatably justified reflexive action in response to an active threat.

Ambrosius overall is portrayed as much more sympathetic in the movie, with the system itself being more to blame for what happened.

In the book, the main thing keeping them apart was Ambrosius’ refusal to take responsibility and admit what he did. In the movie, it’s a misunderstanding about Ballister seemingly turning evil.

In the book, Ambrosius and Ballister have a very established hero-villain dynamic with the joust having happened years ago. In the movie the “betrayal” is still very fresh, which leads to very different interactions between the two.

And that’s about it! Thank you for reading this very long post. And if you haven’t read the original graphic novel or watched the movie, go do that!!! Much love to ND Stevenson and the rest of the people who made this story come to life.

Let me know your thoughts in the tags or the replies! Which version do you prefer? Are there any other factors you feel have a significant role in why their relationship feels so different? Or do you think I’m totally wrong about this and they feel basically the same to you?

Either way, thanks again for reading and goodbye!

[petrichormore]

So about 4halo “dying…”

I’m watching the clip where Forever shows Baghera the book and supposedly “friendzones” Bad because I didn’t actually see the full thing and… why did people think the ship is dead? (I know Forever apparently revived it hours later but bear with me).

Because from where I’m standing, it’s perfectly fine? It’s been more dead in the past. So let’s break the scene down:

(Scene Analysis under cut - I felt like I was watching something straight out of a romcom movie. Also the following is about the CHARACTERS)

So. Forever shows Baghera the book and Baghera asks if he feels the same way. Forever says, “There’s a problem, Baghera - I love him back. (Pause) I love him back, but as a friend.”

Baghera goes “really?” because she’s skeptical and Forever claims that his “heart can’t take it anymore.” (Obviously in reference to Philza breaking it.) He then goes on to say that “After what happened to Philza, I think [thought] I had enough of it.”

I’d like to pause here to point out that at no point in this conversation does Forever sound confident in what he’s saying - he’s uncharacteristically shaken and unsure throughout. He uses phrases like “I thought” and “I’m trying” instead of “I know” and “I am” which imply uncertainty. He phrases his statements like questions, as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in his own mind.

Anyway, Forever says he likes Bad “as a friend” but his reasoning is literally just “I’m not ready for this right now” which… makes no sense to say if the first statement is true. If you aren’t interested in someone, you probably don’t justify by claiming you aren’t ready - because it’s just a fact relating to the other person. Saying “Oh there’s a big problem - I like this person as a friend because my heart can’t take the pain of heartbreak anymore!” Like. That doesn’t really make sense, does it?

He also tries to bring up a conversation dramatrio had a while back about how friendship is better (based, btw) - but to me it honestly just sounds as though he’s trying to convince himself rather than making a statement. Again, he sounds very confused. In response, Baghera points out that “not everyone is happy” with just friendship.

Forever also seems to be just generally confused with Bad’s behavior, as he sees it as uncharacteristic (which it is) and therefore disingenuous. This actually seems to be the main source of distress for him: whether or not Bad actually loves him. He talks to Baghera about how he doesn’t even know if it’s real because it’s so unlike Bad - Baghera agrees that it’s strange coming from Bad, but she believes Richarlyson when he says the book is genuine. Forever doesn’t, and later on in the stream he apparently reveals that he doesn’t understand how Bad could love him in a romantic sense and doesn’t want to be drawn in to something that might not be real? (Maybe???) As Forever is still streaming, I can’t go over it but I will when I can. Either way, this doesn’t seem like the type of worry a person who doesn’t reciprocate any romantic feelings would have? Like cool story bro but this really shouldn’t be relevant if your only feelings are platonic?

And Baghera? Baghera literally notices this! She sees Forever’s indecisiveness and says “Okay, but if you don’t like him like that, well, it’s not a question, you know?” She calls him out on it directly.

And Forever doesn’t acknowledge it at all. He just moves on and says that if Bad had approached him when he first joined, he would’ve been delighted to add another boyfriend in alongside Philza [Specifically, he brings up a song about Snow White and the phrase ‘Why have just one when I could have seven?] This, while funny as hell, has nothing to do with the conversation and it honestly comes across as Forever trying to examine his own feelings and failing miserably.

Baghera asks “So you’re sure you don’t want anything to happen with Bebou?”

Forever responds “yeah” and then immediately follows it up with “The problem is that after what happened, I’m really…” So ‘yeah’ is not an actual answer here, just a transitional word. (And again, notice the strange justification. The problem apparently not a lack of romantic attraction?)

Baghera follows that up by asking if Forever doesn’t want a relationship with Bad because he has been hurt by his previous ‘relationship’, or because he has no romantic interest in Bad specifically. Forever… doesn’t answer. He says, “Yeah, that’s a good question because I don’t even know if he likes me like that, or if he just loves me as a friend.” Once again, ‘yeah’ is not an answer, just a transition. Congratulations, Forever, you specified exactly nothing.

And thennnnn Forever is back to being worried over whether or not Bad likes him or like-likes him (it’s like they’re all gossiping 10 year olds hehe). He’s scared to ask him directly because he doesn’t want to “hurt him” (by ‘him’, I mean BBH) but it really just sounds like he’s a goddamn coward (affectionate) and is using that as an excuse. Especially since he phrases it like a question.

Baghera decides to take pity on him and offers to sneakily question Bad about it and then report back, which Forever immediately agrees to (it’s the most enthusiastic he sounds during the entire conversation). Forever than says that he really wants to “know what is happening” and to “take care of Badboy because he’s really important to me” (?? We all know, Forever, but okay cool I guess?? /j)

He finishes by reasserting (to himself, mostly) that he doesn’t want a relationship specifically because he’s trying to focus on his career, family, and friends (and because Philza broke his heart). He never says that he has no romantic interest in Bad besides the very first “as a friend” comment, and, in fact, somehow avoids saying it even when Baghera asks him directly to his face!

He honestly gives every reason for not wanting to be in a relationship except for “I’m not interested in the other person.” Like that’s the one thing he doesn’t say.

So. Take that however you will.

[livvywritesworld]

livvywritesworld

livvy, 20, they/she, writer

weird girl literary fiction, literary horror, literary sff, & speculative fiction

subgenres: folk horror & light sci-fi

religious imagery, eldritch horror, mean weird lesbians, complex mother/daughter relationships, body horror, character studies, explorations of the body (chronic illness & queerness), and being ukrainian diaspora in the united states

longform wips, short fiction, & poetry

this page supports palestine and believes in a free, autonomous palestine

horror/film/hist/anth catch-all account: @deciduousangel please feel free to follow

ᯓ★ i’ve been writing and revising a literary horror book called the lambs, screaming for a couple years now. there’s a lot of religious imagery, body horror, vague supernatural/eldritch fuckery, and a complex homoerotic friendship between two despicable, grieving girls casey and bethan.

ᯓ★ i have been intermittently writing and planning out two full-length novels based on unpublished short stories of mine. the first is a modular novel following multiple people’s lives as they are impacted by an alien invasion except the aliens aren’t here to invade, they’re here to learn. the second is another literary speculative fiction following two main characters: a young neanderthal woman that has been jurassic park’d by a lab in northern california (this is a real thing scientists are trying to do btw), and one of the female anthropologists that contributed to this experiment. i refer to this project as unironically planet of the apes for phoebe bridgers enjoyers.

ᯓ★ i am a history and anthropology student with a minor in creative writing, and i am almost always at the mercy of a research paper deadline or two. my interests are medical history in ciudad de mexico, indigenous andean gender systems, historical epidemiology, and paleopathology (my one true love). i firmly believe in decolonizing anthropology and making academic anthropological writing more accessible.

ᯓ★ besides writing, i love horror, david cronenberg movies, joni mitchell, the x files, the locked tomb, baldur’s gate 3, any media with substantial body horror, playing video games, and reading when i get the chance. my favorite movies include: the fly, longlegs, humanist vampire seeking consenso ring suicidal person, sucker punch, little miss sunshine, dinner in america, and a girl walks home alone at night. my favorite book of all time is patrícia melo’s the simple art of killing a woman. i am also a massive fan of julia armfield, carmen maria machado, and steven graham jones.

ᯓ★ i am a published writer with multiple poems and some short stories floating around the online space, look out for any link postings of recently published work. i am also a staff writer for a very cool zine, and am an experienced and established writer.

ᯓ★ the standard dni applies. dni if you are under 17.

ᯓ★ i stand firmly with palestine 🇵🇸

links to my wips will go here:

[myrskytuuli]

Welp, I finally watched Longlegs...it was a dissapointment.

I was pretty hyped for Longlegs ever since the really intriguing trailer and very good marketing campaign started, and even went out of my way to avoid spoilers before seeing the movie. With expectations so high for another artistic, slow-paced, psychological horror ala Hereditary or the VVitch, I have to say I was left wanting. The more I rotated the movie in my head, the more dissapointed I get.

Warning here be spoilers!

Longlegs is a story about an FBI agent who displays slight psychic abilities on her first case and is then assigned to help with a perplexing serial killer case, the Longlegs case. In longlegs case all forensic evidence suggests a murder-suicide of a family, and cryptogram letters left on the crime scenes and signed by "Longlegs" are the only hint that someone or something else has been involved with the murders. The main character, Lee Harker, eventually finds out that the murders are commited via devil-worshiping man called Longlegs, who makes a life-sized, Satan-infested, doll resembling the family's daughter, gifting it to the family, which then possess the dad to kill the family and himself. In the end, Lee figures out that she was supposed to be one of the victims as s child and that her mom made a deal with the devil to help with the doll-murder-scheme in exchange for Lee's safety.

Let's start with the biggest, most obvious one. The titular character Longlegs is a transmisogynistic caricature who could just as well be a distasteful Daily Wire sketch spliced between the scenes of a serious horror movie. Longlegs, both the movie and the character, relies way too hard on the expectation that you will accept a close up of a middle-aged man in a badly applied lipstick to be a jumpscare in itself. But we will return to Longlegs the character little later. First, I want to talk about Longlegs the movie.

Longlegs is both too much and not enough. It markets itself as an occult detective mystery, but unfortunately instead of getting best of both worlds, it strips both the detective story and the occult story off of its most enjoyable elements. For a detective mystery there isn't much detecting, and for occult movie there isn't much occult.

A lot of occult horrors have gone out of their way to base their stories around real occult histories and as a consequence are full of easter eggs for those who recognise the historical nods. Hereditary references the Lesser Key of Solomon, The VVitch based its horror on real 1600 century archival texts, and even As Above So Below followed real alchemical traditions. This allowed those movies to avoid infodumbing lore, while still having internally consistant mythology that you can dig deeper into, if you want to. Longlegs does not do this. It handwaves towards the idea of satanic occult without ever creating its own internal mythology nor relying on one consistant real-life source. Which for me, personally, felt like a very frustrating experience, because you can't connect the dots of why whatever occult means are used.

Why was Lee getting visions of snakes? Because snakes are spooky and associated with the devil. Why were there bible quotes left at the crime scenes? Because they come from the Revelation and the revelation is the spooky chapter of the bible. Why were these murders being commited? Because Lucifer was bored. Why did the haunted dolls need vibrating metal spheres inserted inside their heads in order to be haunted? So that the doctor can put a stetoschope on one and hear evil vibrations. Why dolls? Because the director read a book about voodoo and found the idea of symphatetic magic spooky. (Not what symphatetic magic means btw. It has nothing to do with christian magic tradition or possession)

lacklustre magical theory could be excused, and I have excused in many other movies, with otherwise solid or entertaining plots, but this movie about catching a serial killer does not actually offer the viewer any clues to put together or follow the detective along the trail of mystery. rememeber that slightly psychic part? A huge mistake in my opinion, which cripples the movie for no reason. (Also, I really felt like the scene of the FBI having a psychic testing program was a leftover from an entirely different movie. Why was it there, what did it contribute??)

Lee is a passive vessel being led around by her psychic visions to every clue and revelation. She doesn't figure things out for herself, instead she receives answers from her visions or by her sixth sense, or by other people telling her the answers. She solves the Longlegs cryptogram because the Cipher is literally handed to her by Longlegs. She finds the picture of Longlegs by being guided to it by her sixth sense, and finally sees the final plotwist of the movie in a dream narrated to her by her mom. There is an actual literal flashback scene that explains the twist, without any lead up of the puzzle pieces slotting into place. As a mystery, it's bad.

okay but why is Longlegs even here? No, but for real. This is one of those movie tries to do too much moments. The movie's focus is supposed to be on Lee, solving a murder mystery, and her strained relationship with her mom, who is secretely killing people. But instead of letting that plot develop and breathe, too much time is spent following Longlegs, who is what? Middle-manager of this scheme? The scheme which goes like this:

Lucifer wants to kill people -> Lucifer contracts a socially maladjusted crossdresser named Longlegs to build dolls which Lucifer can then possess -> Longlegs contracts Ruth Harker to knock on people's doors dressed as a nun and smuggle the dolls inside people's houses -> Lucifer, once inside the house, influences the dad to murder his family and himself -> ???????profit

It's halfway through the movie, why, instead of getting any development for the main character, am I watching Lucifer's doll guy fail at making small talk at the convenience store???!!!!!

Okay, joking aside, lets talk about the transmisogyny and ableism.

Longlegs is an older man(?) who dresses in women's clothes and wears grotesque amounts of makeup, while exhibiting behaviours best described as autistic stims, and lives in Lee's mom's basement.

His mannerisms osciliate between childish deference to aggressive cussing in a way that brings to mind stereotypes of low-fucntioning autistic behaviour. It's very uncomfortable to watch and not in the way the movie wants. I think there is something almost darkly ironic in the way that thorought the whole movie, we never actually see Longlegs, the titular movie monster, do anything evil, and the entire loadbearing part of holding the movie's uncanny athmosphere rests on us finding Longlegs' behaviour creepy without seeing him commit any attrocities. Sure, the uncanniness is supposed to come from the fact that we know that he is the killer, but the movie doesn't want to show us that part. Imagine watching Friday the 13th but you only see Jason doing grocery shopping with his hockey mask on and hear about other characters talking about the murders that happened off-screen. no seriously, why is Longlegs here?

We never find out anything about Longlegs, why he worships Lucifer, why he started the murder doll-scheme with Lucifer in the first place, or what his history is. In the movie Longlegs, Longlegs doesn't matter. Lee finds a picture of him in her home and In the next scene he has been arrested. Longlegs kills himself during the police interview, and Lee goes off to find the actual important part of the mystery, her mom. So....why did we spend all that time with Lucifer's doll guy? Wouldn't all that time have been better spent slowly finding clues that reveal Lee's mom's as the perpetrator???

The metaphor of Longlegs is confused at best, if it even is supposed to have one, which I personally doubt. Sure, the director says is is about the darkness in us all and about families, but...is it?

Longlegs makes gestures towards wanting to be a movie about family violence, but it never arrives at it. The outside influence satanic panic is played comletely straight. There could be something about Ruth, the church lady, being allowed inside family homes because she looks trusthworthy, and bringing with her forces which lead to family violence, but the fact that the force causing the violence is literally the devil in league with a vaguelly inhuman (does he have magic powers? Maybe?) crossdresser kind of kneecaps that interpretation. Allowing strangers inside your suburban home is the root of all evil in this movie. Even Ruth joined in leagues with Longlegs under duress, after home invasion.

The deepest the movie gets is that sometimes parents lie to their children and that makes those children distant from their parents. But that's the literal thing that happens in the movie, this movie isn't really a metaphor for anything in the way that Hereditary or Nope or any other horror movie that seamlessly functions as both good in-universe storie and out-universe fable.

Okay, so there is one very redeeming part this movie has and it's Bill Clinton's giant portrait looming over way more scenes than you would expect, with the energy that I would best describe as Laura Palmer's photograph in the end credits of Twin Peaks. Somehow, Bill Clinton is haunting this narrative.

[fantasygerard2000]

Read your arguments for Magnifico and honestly they aren't as well presented either. They are just mainly assumptions rather than actual things established in the movie. Especially calling him a narcissist and associating a disorder, which you are trying to use the NPD version here, to natural prone to evil traits. We can say he's vain, but we really need to not touch narcissm here

This is not me saying he's not a villain or that I particularly cared for him btw. He's a very boring villain and character overall. They all are ngl.

The movie just has a tone problem with its characters cuz at the end of the day they had an entirely different story in mind just to revamp it and confusing animators and writers what these characters are supposed to be like. Amaya was evil at one point but since they scrapped that now she's just clueless but also witnessed all the "bad things" Magnifico has done which makes her an accomplice but also not really shes just a background character that just doesn't do anything significant.

But yeah Magnifico is one of those characters where I don't see him as a victim or a compelling villain either cuz the story doesn't establish anything to make me care. Same thing for Asha though

It's just every time I read something from Magnifico fans or hater or whatever you fall in, it's just assumptions based on preconceived notions of other Disney villains

"The evil queen and Gaston are villains because they are vain!" No what made them villains is that they killed and did other evil deeds because they couldn't stand to be second best and thats based on their vain. Magnifico's vanity doesn't do anything for his villainy other than sing an obnoxious musical number. If some part of his vanity had any part of his villainy it's immediately overshadowed with that stupid book that supposedly makes it's users evil a very useless detail for a villain that is naturally bad from the start. Wouldn't it had been interesting if Amaya assumed the book turns you evil but it actually doesn't Magnifico has always been like that? But nope, the book establishes this lore

Anyways sorry for this essay it's just this movie messed up on so many beats that I can't help but see why there are so many conflicting opinions of these characters. They either have nothing or the movie gives them conflicting goals that don't add up

Oh, so we entering ethics of diagnosing a fictional characters now? Magnifico has traits of a narcissist but I never said anything about him having NPD, or diagnosing him because I ain't no psychiatrist and I know full well that diagnosing a character with a disorder has obviously unfortunately implications towards real people who have them so I avoid doing that. If I did so unintentionally, I apologize because that was not my intention.

Gaston and the Evil Queen are villains because their stories are personal to their main characters. Snow White and the dwarfs see the queen as a villain because she wants Snow White dead for being prettier than her. The reason she hasn't been overthrown because she's literally the queen and people don't want to piss her off.

Same with Gaston who the town sees as a public figure and a bit of a local celebrity. Belle only sees him as a self entitled jerk but what made him crossed it is when he threatened to send Maurice into the asylum if Belle refuses to marry him.

Tremaine is a better example because she does what it takes to make Cinderella's life miserable just to make herself feel better. She would have just find another rich man to marry and leave Cinderella, but no, she chose to remain in that house and treat her as a slave in her own house because she wants to. It's her spite and pettiness that made her dedicated to treat Cinderella like garbage.

While Wish does indeed have issues, the people who are confused about it are either just not paying attention or are just looking for an excuse to be angry at not understanding it. Wish is very straightforward with its story and themes yet people who sympathize with Magnifico flat out refuse to get it in their heads that Magnifico is a straight up cult leader and just like real life cult leaders, they isolate their followers, feeding them beliefs so that they can only rely on their leaders.

The reason why I'm vocal against Magnifico defenders are largely because they treat him like he did nothing wrong and accuse Asha of being the real villain for suggesting him to doing his dang job as a king and granter of wishes. Recently, I just don't like to engage with them, largely because just like with debatebros, debating with them is just a waste of time and stressful.

Playing middle ground against the haters and the fans isn't exactly a hill worth dying on because if you genuinely don't care, you wouldn't be participating in telling both sides are incorrect.

And to be honest, after seeing so many people talking about how Wish is not as good as the stuff they like, I just honestly stopped caring about what they say. Even getting recommended videos about why it's animation and music sucks, I just don't watch them and dismiss them. I get that Wish was not a good movie, so was Chicken Little and Home on the Range yet those movies still have fans that grew up watching them.

If you like Wish, good for you. And if you hate it, that's fine. Different tastes in media is not an issue. Its when people who care too much about things they don't like are the ones causing the problem, and they can easily solved if you just don't give them a darn.

[ssaalexblake]

How would you respond to claims that 13's run feels a bit dodgy by having a cop travel with them?

You know, the other day while generally browsing the internet I happened across somebody complaining about this war movie. They were angry it was glorifying soldiers. Were anti-military themselves in general. You know what I mean. The thing is, though, the literature course I did in school had an entire unit and exam on war literature and I've read the book upon which the movie was based on and it has stuck with me as an incredible critique of war, conscription and the military by portraying those things in fiction. I would never pick it up again, not because it was bad, but because it was rough to 17yo me, but I am happy I've read it and other pieces of literature like it. I am happy I was taught to analyse and contextualise media with a serious subject such as that.

Now, this isn't the exact same thing as this. The BBC would legit never allow their lead children's show to Explicitly portray any acab message, like, ever, lets be true to reality here. But also, I genuinely think there is a fair amount of that puritanical black and white thinking going on here on the riff of Yaz working for the police being an immediate strike against the show because people think that portraying something is automatically lauding it because uh, the content of the story does Not track with the idea they're saying cop work is good work.

I have seen (on this site and many others) people say over and over again the only good cops are either dead or have quit bc they realised it was a crock of shit. In which case, the question becomes;

Did y'all miss the part where Yaz quit?

Yaz is not a cop anymore. Yaz quit. Yaz is portrayed as thinking it's frustrating bc because the helping people thing she was supposed to be doing isn't happening and we're shown this from literally the get go, her very first scene, and from there is only seen as trying A) to get work where she's actually helping somebody and totally failing to get it and B) straight up trying to get out of going to work by actually forging paperwork. S/O to her for that bit of illegality btw. Love that for her. She does not end the series employed by the police. Yaz found an actual way to help people and chose to do That instead.

Yaz's career arc is 'disillusioned teen signs up to be cop, realises it's bullshit and there are actual ways to help people and quits to go do that instead' which is, if i'm not mistaken, what we want actual real life cops to realise about their life choices.

I get it's a tetchy subject bc acab, i agree, and I get and agree and wish that this stuff could be more explicitly portrayed as well bc i'm sick of media or execs being too cowardly to be bold about messaging, but the insinuation that this portrayed the cops as systematically helpful or useful by having Yaz start out as a cop? No. Would I have liked it to be more explicit? Well yes, duh, but I cannot emphasise how that was literally never gonna happen. I can however emphasise how ideas like Yaz, whose main goal is to help, quitting being a cop bc she wasn't helping anybody beamed into impressionable young minds do, in fact, take root though.

Like, having a plucky teen hero character go through an arc of helping people and them Ending a cop to carry on the good work is Vastly different to a plucky teen starting out a cop bc they think that's how they get to help people then quitting bc they realised that's not true. One of these things is pro cop, the other is not.

I also hasten to mention again that there is a genuine conversation here abt the dodgy-ness cops being used in mental health emergencies. I wrote this out about it [Here].

On a personal note on this score, I, much like Sonya have been forced to deal with cops throughout somebody else's mental health emergency when I never should have had to and it fucking sucked. What an unempathetic bunch of rats who clearly haven't even done a google search's worth of research on how to discuss these things, let alone give it the gravity it deserves. That my choices were either cops or somebody dying is a travesty. And maybe this story speaks to me more personally as somebody who has had this experience and wants to throw hands over it still over a decade later, but that lady did not help Yaz, Yaz helped herself after a measly pep talk and the woman obviously never bothered to keep tabs and see if Yaz was okay afterwards either. Ryan helped his mate. Graham spreads good mental health advice that benefits others. The hospital in Syria was dealing in mental heath care by professionals of the time. Cop lady convinced Yaz to go home, succeeded, and Yaz gave her the credit when it was Her who dug herself out of that pit and not anybody else.

Like, genuinely this whole thing sets me off angry. And I could critique the execution if I wanted to but the bottom line is i've not actually seen anything else even go slightly Near where this plot went and I genuinely think it was something that should be said. As I said, a decade later and I still want to throw hands.

So basically like, I get the discomfort, I do, I get not wanting to see it as well, but Yaz grew OUT of this. Not the other way around. Portrayal is not endorsement. I do not personally find this era difficult to parse but people seem either unwilling or unable to do so on literally every theme addressed in it, but I am just back to being that 17yo in an english lit class being taught how to examine things through the vehicle of anti-war stories, ones that people are actually nowadays mad at for glorifying war just because they portray it when this couldn't be farther from the truth, and I cannot help but relate the situations a bit.

I mean, I don't think it's a 10/10 and I would tweak, but I am aware you won't be finding anything as bold as blatant acab on dw in this geopolitical climate and since that's endemic literally everywhere i'm not gonna single out This show for it when at least its trying (watching classic who and the things they just openly say and portray is soooooo eye opening. TV of the 21st century has no spine in general.) But the portrayal of something does not imply that said thing is positive. If real cops ditching the badge on principle is a good thing that we want to continue, I fail to see how fake ones portraying that said same thing is bad.

[matildaelsiee]

[ matilda’s blog ~

hey, my loves!! welcome <3 i hope my terrible rambling isn’t too painful for you to stick around a while c; ˏˋ°•*⁀➷

₊˚ʚ 🌱 ₊˚✧ ﾟ. → tilda | she/her | 14 | july cancer | infp | british | wannabe psychologist | amateur writer but professional mentally unstable mess | i keep deleting my posts and restarting my blog jhsjskdh | bisexual | obsessed an unhealthy amount with a lot of things | yaps way too much!! (im gonna stop here and yap further down instead nyahahha)

over 18s and any discriminatory people, please dni!

:¨ ·.· ¨: `· . sorry for the amount of yap your about to witness! // and already have witnessed.. 𓂃 ⋆˙。

“and in the echoes of silence, i found a symphony of whispers.”

current favourite songs: when by dodie, end scene by ruel, strawberry wine by noah kahan, long live (taylor’s version) by taylor swift, feels like by gracie abrams

things i like: autumn, pinterest, spotify, cats (ESPECIALLY kittens), making up stories based on songs or playlists, tea, books, tv shows/movies, sleeping etc.

interests/hobbies: photography, reading, gaming (mostly minecraft and roblox), watching youtube, writing, journalling, napping and absolutely loads more but it’s 1am and i need to sleep lol

this is my first ever blog so it’s gonna be a little (this means extraordinarily in my dictionary btw) chaotic and messy for a while, since i’m still getting used to everything. i am hoping to make some online friends though, it’s been one of my childhood dreams for some strange reason, so please do reach out to me (warning: i am quite socially awkward and will probably yap and seem psychotic somehow-) <33

i will be taking questions and requests for various things as soon as i’ve got my blog sorted (although sometimes my ask box will be closed if i have too many to do/don’t have time)

“other people may reject you but if you lie on the forest floor for long enough the moss and fungi will always accept you as one of their own”

if your reading this, im ultimately grateful for you staying through me nattering about messy nonsensical bs so here’s a hug for it (and just in case you need it!) -> 🫂

p.s. im gonna be so real..i have no idea how to use tumblr 😭 when i’ve learnt the ways, i’ll come back and fix this.. but for now i’ll post it under my tag (♯┆tilda .ᐟ ★)

[sunkissedfawn]

Lewis: Tolkien, have you been indoctrinating my brother again?

Tolkien: Me? No, never.

Lewis: What about Weldon?

Tolkien: Ah.

Lewis: He’s always been an atheist.

Tolkien: He’s a rabid one.

Lewis: How could he, of anyone, take the Bible literally? It’s a fictional anthology of myths and legends.

Tolkien: Jack, when you read myths about gods that come to earth and sacrifice themselves, their stories move you, so long as you read it anywhere but the Bible.

Lewis: That’s nonsense, and you know it.

Tolkien: Pagan myths are born through God expressing himself. But the myth of Christ, you know, that is God expressing himself through himself. And what makes it more than myth is that... Well, Christ actually walked the earth among us. His dying transforms myth into truth. And it transforms the lives of all those who believe in him.

Lewis: John, you're a scholar. Don’t you have an obligation to the truth?

Tolkien: Yes, the same as you.

[gellavonhamster]

monthly media recap: august 2024

read:

Cabal by Clive Barker - oh you know, I've yapped about it and Nightbreed a lot here. The intersection of horror and eroticism, the monstrous and the divine, the queer allegory, the monsterfucking. So good.

The Second Continuation of Perceval - I liked it better than The First Continuation which I didn't even finish, but by the end I still decided to put my Arthuriana reading on pause for the time being. These were dragging me into a reading slump which passed as soon as I stopped trying to get through them. Going back to The Second Continuation, I am tragically unable not to picture that little dog that Perceval carried around as a chihuahua

Jelgava 94 by Jānis Joņevs - part coming-of-age, part chronicle of Latvian metalhead culture, extremely funny (even funnier than I remember the movie adaptation to be).

Rīgas raganas (Witches of Riga) by Linda Nemiera - first assumed it's gonna be the kind of ~ironic~ fantasy I've kinda outgrown, then got seriously hooked (the fact that it's set in my city certainly helped), then came the anticlimactic ending. Still, mostly liked it in the end. Also, gotta say it's extremely funny how the author created a magical explanation for the very real recent phenomena of roads caving in and cars falling into the resulting pits. Was reading this like oh right, this happened next to our office

The Amateur Cracksman and The Black Mask by E. W. Hornung - been reading the Raffles & Bunny short stories through Substack and just realized it has already covered the first two collections! This reading method is not for me, but the stories themselves are charming. They're like, what if Holmes and Watson but gentlemen thieves (Hornung was Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, btw) and also partially based on Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas? Really a very nice read.

+ currently reading: Weaveworld by Clive Barker

watched:

Nightbreed (1990), the Cabal Cut - not the version I'd, like, recommend to a random person, because it's glued together from the theatrical release and deleted scenes (some of which don't even have sound) and what not, but it really is much closer to the novel than the theatrical cut. See the post linked above for more thoughts on the book and both cuts of the movie

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) - finally watched it, and it was as delightful as I was promised :) I thought I saw enough spoilers for it, but I somehow didn't expect that ending at all, loved it. Loved the relationship between the sisters, too.

Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021), Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021), Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021) - me watching part 1-2: eh it's alright, not very original but interesting, and I like the kids. Me watching part 3: oh it's GOOD good! Thank you OPLA cast for luring me in

[alter-soup]

Okay here is our request! Apologies in advance for the sheer length of this message JSIFDOGJSDOF

So we've been feeling one of our sidesystems splitting an alter introjected from the song "Baby Turns Blue" by Virgin Prunes and we have some details we can already guess about them but would like you to make! (Including neopronouns, especially ones that aren't nounself pronouns. Picrew is optional.)

Based on stuff we know about the sidesystem they'd be splitting in, they're at least 48 years old, probably somewhat older. Also probably an (aro)ace-spec gay man (mspec gay is an option!) as well as some kind of agender and/or gender neutral masc/man, but you can choose the specifics of that! Feel free to add xenos and soforth too, especially kenochoric genders and/or xenos related to goth or to music in general.

For names, ideally something neutral-coded that's not a "typical" name for a person (the other members of the sidesys are called Mori, Ransom, Chrome, and Nix, to give you an idea of what would fit in with the rest of them). Masc names are fine too though!

Roles that members of their sidesystem tend to have include: symptom holder (addiction, depression, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts), social alter, anger holder, spiritual alter, and trauma holder (the last of which we would definitely like you to include).

Knowing the rest of the sidesystem, this alter would have some connection to writing, horror, singing/performance, and/or death, as well as music genres like goth (this is definite given the genre of the source song), post-punk (also very adjacent genre), new wave, and metal. Also maybe "regular" punk too. But it'd be cool if you gave them other random interests too!

Hope this wasn't either too much or too little info! (Also hope that sending a request for elaboration on an alter we've felt splitting is within the scope of this blog's work.) Thanks for reading and for doing it if you do this request!

HEADMATE INSPO

Name(s): Lucid

Role(s): Trauma holder, addiction holder

Pronouns: Name, they/them, he/him

Neopronouns ideas:  Ix/ixs, dy/dys, um/ums

Xenogenders: Voidcattic Demonmascic Valicanic Gothgender

Gender(s): Demiboyflux

Orientation: Gay Aegosexual

Age: 50-53

Species: Unknown but presents as human-like 

Source: Baby Turns Blue by Virgin Prunes

Personality traits/details: Somewhat careless, a bit reserved, independent

Kins: Ghostkin

Likes: Slashers, short horror stories, goth music, skatecore playlists, metal, post-punk, two sentence horror stories, angler fish, stories of real “haunted” locations, movie adaptations of books they like 

Dislikes: Really intense eye strain, loud dogs barking, feeling forgotten

Signoff: - 🪦🫐

Appearance: Really deep blue fluffy hair, red scleras, pale-dead looking skin

Everything can be modified and added upon! :D

Picrew and appearance are just for fun and to give ideas btw :) 

Faceclaim:

(Picrew)

[baconcolacan]

@letmeaskdanielaquestion I hope you dont mind but I’m posting this because its impossible for me to answer fully in the replies. And I count this as another ask so just in case someone else has something similar to ask they can look to this one :] Also thank you again for the previous kind words!

And, hrm…about writing, yes I did write a lot before regimen, but its far FAR from being any good. Thankfully most of my early works have never seen the light of day (because they’re in a now dead and deleted fb group) and the ones that did never got off the ground and is lost in ff.net. I was a horrible, horrible, little goblin of a writer and a total weeb. If you cant imagine in, just know that I used stuff like “Kya~!” in the writing……..yeah, I’m choking from embarrassment how did you know?

I also understand the perfectionism bit btw. I’m diagnosed with OCD, and my brand of OCD makes me obsessed with perfection among other things, to the point where I risk bodily harm to achieve it. It took me years of therapy and medication to overcome it, so I understand giving up when you feel something isnt up to your standards. The best advice I can give is this:

When writing, your first draft is just that, your first draft, it doesnt matter if there are grammatical errors and wonky dialogue, its there for you to have fun with and go wild on, word vomiting whatever you feel is the best next sentence. Personally, it feels cathartic to put down all my thoughts on the paper instead of letting them fester in my head, at least its out and not bugging me from within my own mind. I dont sweat the details of my first draft, I just need the words out of my head and physically there so it doesnt bother me as much. Trust me, ideas love to nip and yap at any creative’s heels until they make them real, only then will you have your peace and quiet.

And if you want more order? Before your first draft, make a skeleton of your story, put down the events that happen in each chapter in bullet points. I assume you’ve read chapter 1 of Regimen already so I’ll give my chapter skeleton as an example:

Regimen: Act 1 Outlines

Ch1 - Escape

* Pick up from Armistice. Tom is stumbling through the woods trying to get back to base

* Introduce some unit mates and their relationships with Tom

* Tom hides the fact that the General is dead + his encounter with Tord

* Peace treaty is aired. Things go horribly wrong (Tord is a bastard snake here, remember that Neil)

* Tom announces his intention to escape Norway. The others follow.

* Add context to the world and the state of Norway at the moment, have Tom reflect on his relationship with Tord compared to others. (Hes wrong btw, he ***I erased this next part because the note spoils something***)

* The escape ends in tragedy. Most of the unit is destroyed.

And for inspo? I always suggest different media: books, shows, movies etc etc. Analyze them, see how the plot flows, what works and what doesn’t, how does the story progress? Do they use flashbacks? How often? Exposition? How much? etc etc.

But ah, take my advice with a grain of salt. I’m a professional visual artist, I’m just a hobbyist when it comes to writing ^^;

[annbourbon]

Well hello folks! It's that time of the year again! And here's my 2023 movie list, keep on mind I actually made the effort to watch movies I have never seen before, even though they're old... so even if you already watched them because they're classics, I didn't until now.

I actually need to get some books to read but for now binged all these days to watch 31 movies & series in a couple of days.

1. Mask Girl (K-Drama, series)✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

Okay this series was amazing. I've been a fan of Orange Caramel even though they're now disbanded, so seeing Nana back on the scene was so cool. But that's not all, honestly:

* Insane plot, made me gasp a couple of times and I've been into K-Drama for a while now so...

* I was actually rooting for Kim Mo-mi the whole time, but also I couldn't find myself to hate the other characters because the actors are so good<3

* Did I mention Nana is there?

* It has so many layers and many points of view which makes it so interesting to watch

I'm not saying anything else because I highly recommend this one.

2. The Platform (movie) ✅⭐⭐

A bit boring at times but quite interesting too. I watched it because someone recommended it to me. I was so disappointed with the ending but at the same time I understood why it finished the way it did. I'm not going to watch it again though. Definitely hated it.

3. Scream (movie, 2023 ver.) ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

Since I already watched the original one. This one was awesome. I loved the original cast coming back, and also, Jenna Ortega 😍😚

4. Suspiria (remake)✅⭐⭐⭐

I got bored lol it is aesthetic but not a lot. I prefer the school on the original movie. Like, it's so pretty...

Actually I got, really bored at some parts. I wanted the whole ballet concept to be more... macabre and beautiful. They could have put anything else and the idea would have been the same.

I enjoyed the dance. But it's not classical ballet. I'm giving it an extra star because of the aesthetics. It's not creepy or scary. Just another film. Some parts are awesome but mostly... bland.

5. The Deep House ✅⭐⭐

I think, I was disappointed. It's one of those old school movies, you either love it or hate it. I ended up disliking it a lot because it felt kind of lazy. There was no message behind, there was no reason for me to actually care about them as characters, and BTW, the dude there, he was sooooo toxic. I ended up hating him the whole movie except for his last moments. I really don't recommend this one lol but here you have me, trying to find something different.

Well, sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

6. Doctor Sleep ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

I need to be honest, he's still one of my first celebrity crushes. So I might be a bit biased. But I loved the movie. Before you say anything to me, I have watched The Shinning already.

7. Gothika ✅⭐⭐

I might as well be honest. I saw this movie when I was a kiddo. But I had a lot of nightmares about it. Still, now I got to watch it fully. And I realized that it's not as intense as I thought it was. I mean, yes. It has some scenes. But I'm a Hannibal Lecter and Criminal Minds fan now lol it's kind of difficult to get past that.

8. Dreamcatcher ✅⭐⭐⭐

It started pretty average and I was expecting nothing from it. But it got better. And really scary. I hated the bathroom scene but also loved the whole movie.

9. Only Mine ✅⭐⭐⭐

Scary but because it's based on a real story. The movie is pretty decent.

10. Train to Busan ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Was so cool 💕 😢 more than scary it was inspiring me a lot. IDK how to explain it. But I'll be watching it again because *feelings*

I think it's becoming one of my favorite horror movies.

11. Annihilation ✅⭐⭐

Mmmmm I fell asleep. Had to watch it again. And it was not that interesting. I loved the colors though. If I have to say anything about it lol 💤😴

12. Psycho (1960) ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I can't believe it took me so long to watch this one!!! I love this movie I swear. It's such a good one. It's not as scary as I thought it would be but I think that's a "me" problem lol since it seems like I'm so used to scary things nothing really scares me anymore.

However, the suspense was so in point and I can't even believe that I was holding my breath. Like, how? This movie is so old no? It should be boring and all that uh? Well it doesn't matter. Hitchcock definitely knew his way around. It caught my interest and hold me captive till the end of the movie. I didn't even start scrolling my phone or got bored!

Sure there are a couple of plots that can be "fixed" because we now have better phones and technology, but the whole movie it's timeless. It definitely holds. I loved it. A lot. That can't be said of several other movies and tv shows.

13. Constantine ✅⭐⭐⭐

Not really scary. But really cool. I was having a crush over Tilda Swinton the whole time lol sadly she doesn't get to have a lot of screentime but I repeated her scenes for a while before going to the next movie.

14. Beowulf ✅⭐⭐

By now I'm getting tired AF of bloodbaths. Like it's not even scary. It's disgusting and tiresome. I want to see something else. I really did not enjoy the movie. I'm starting to realize that binging on a certain genre can desensitize a person and it certainly feels like I'm way over it. I remember the movie but I can't remember anything that is worth of comment. Except, maybe... that Beowulf is an asshole, so is the king, and apparently the next king will do the same thing and everyone there deserved what happened to them except ofc the people in town and kids. I don't think I liked the story or movie at all. 💀

15. Disturbing Behavior ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

Okay so James Marsden and Katie Holmes are so cute together. And they're literally kids here. It was a bit awkward lol but I enjoyed the movie. It's kind of interesting and definitely talks about how society pressures you on behaving in a certain way. All that while making a scary movie. Which is why I might've ended up liking it a bit more than the others. Interesting how parents were so on board with this behavior too. Anyway, since I'm on a marathon I don't really have a lot of time to analyze it as much as I usually do. I probably won't be watching it again, but it's a good movie to analyze and enjoy for a while. For real.

16. The Exorcist (original) ✅⭐⭐⭐

Now we're getting serious lol or not...

Honest reaction

Before the movie>> I'm so scared of it 😭😿😱

During and after the movie>>> wow... It's so... meh 😑

I was a bit distracted during the whole movie. And it's not that scary. Just sad, long, boring and disappointing. Nothing else to comment.

My brother said that I needed to appreciate it a bit more since it's an old movie, but honestly... I prefer Psycho to the Exorcist. Like, I get it. Old movie. Different type of special effects and all that. But still, the whole thing, even the characters feels kinda flat? Nvm the spoilers. I received a similar amount of spoilers from both movies and I still enjoyed Psycho more. I did laughed a lot. But it's not supposed to be a comedy movie 😭🤣

17. 12 Monkeys ✅⭐⭐⭐

TT~TT okay? I really cried for a while. And I had to take some days off because of this one. I started watching other series, kdramas and stuff that made me laugh and forget about this one.

18. Ghost Ship ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I remember seeing this one everywhere when I was a kid and my parents trying to make sure I didn't watch it. One of the reasons I finally got my hands on it and watch it lol

I really enjoyed it. I was so sad about the girl on the ship. And I usually do not like slashers but somehow I ended up loving this one. Definitely is going to be one of my favorite movies from now on.

19. The exorcism of Emily Rose ✅ ⭐⭐

Boring at the beginning but interesting after 30 minutes into the movie. Which in a way, it's not good lol but let it be. I was thinking to call the Winchesters all the time.

Mmmm I think these two are one of the reasons I stopped disliking horror movies.

The other one would be Fi from So Weird

Which TBH is the original reason I stopped disliking ghosts and monsters. I joined Fi team first before Supernatural. Supernatural was me being edgy and sarcastic all the way, especially on my worse days. But Fiona, she's the one I truly aspired to be. Now I think I'm a mix of both and it's okay. I still prefer Fi over the Winchesters because she gives everyone a chance to be. I mean, I love the brothers a lot... okay not the point of this lol sorry... Ummmm I think you can see I got distracted while watching the movie. 💀🤣

Interesting though, a mix of lawyer-ish fight with "medical terms" and all that in a demonic possession case. Different P.O.V. sure. It definitely makes more sense than the Exorcist where the story ends without anyone (no cops, no lawyers, no other authorities) involved despite several people dying.

"Touched by the hand of God" they said. And believe me when I said "ew" during that part 😭🤣 I wasn't even trying to be funny. Seriously though... there's only one thing I despise more than movie slashers. Religion, especially inside movies. And inside books too. I was so disappointed by Susan's problem when I found out what it was about. I also spent almost my entire childhood inside several Catholic and Christian schools. Most of the time being bullied by everyone there. Please lol I can't stand them (I do realize that not everyone is like that but it left a huge trauma on me so I can't stand those things.) The fun part is, I don't have anything against religions. Just against hypocrisy and lack of comprehension. Still, it's okay for a movie. One or two hours of it won't be bothering me so much. Didn't scare me. But made me uncomfortable. I wish I could hear more about Dr. Adani (?) P.O.V. though.... I believe I will have to watch Heroes (series) for a similar take on that.

20. The Barcelona Vamp ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was... triggering. And not about vampires. But about CP and apparently a real case. Obviously Hollywood has its own take on this so I can't say anything about it until I do my research on the real deal. But the whole movie was interesting and also very, very triggering. Really scary. Some scenes were too uncomfortable to watch so I had to pause it several times. Why? These things are so so close to us and people, sometimes people we know, keep hiding these things from us. Maybe the Barcelona Vamp was innocent. Maybe it wasn't. The only thing that it is true is that nothing like this happens without another one getting involved too. Another one keeping silence. Someone refusing to act. That's how bad it is. Not the movie ofc.

I love the use of color and the use of black and white too. It's definitely a good film. The dialogues... they were too realistic. Sadly. I have known people that say things like that. That keep blaming it onto the victims no matter if they're 40 or 6 years old. Don't watch this movie if child abuse triggers you. While it is not graphic it definitely makes you uncomfortable. And it should. Another thing to say about this movie: the original language is in Spanish. And when I saw it on HBO the English subtitles were lacking. So were the subtitles in Spanish. So either you learn/practice your Spanish or you'll need to find CC and the mp4 file too. To make sure you get it otherwise you'll be missing half of the story.

21. Dracula (1979)✅ ⭐⭐⭐

Okay the whole time I was so into the aesthetics. But sometimes I found it funny. Mmmm but I decided to give it a go because it was an old movie. Honestly it wasn't that bad. A bit cringe but kinda okay. The aesthetics were really pleasing tho.

22. Army of the Dead ✅⭐⭐

I started watching it because... it looked fun. Zombieland type of fun.

The OST is awesome. I'm not taking this movie seriously. I don't know why... oh yeah okay... now I kind of understand why.

Okay it has a lot of tits and a lot of blood in the very beginning. If this is how's gonna be... or not. Oh... it gets better after the first minutes 😜 A bit of character development...

I like this idea of zombies being strong and somewhat more fast. Like Korean zombies.

I fell asleep. Again... *sighs* this is ridiculous. I'll have to rewatch just... I'm not sure...

I'll be back. Let me do a quick rewatch.

Zombie tiger Valentine was awesome. Smart zombies? Cool!!

I think I'm bored...

I mean, it's a cool movie. But I prefer Zombieland.

They're supposed to be great at shooting, so why do they spend so many bullets on killing one zombie if they already know to aim for the head?

I'm rooting for the king. He actually seems decent.

Ohh no they killed his baby 😭

They should pay for it.

Okay... okay, wait a second lol I'm getting an idea...

Why there are no movies with zombies as main characters where the humans are the bad ones?

I mean, we have all what it takes: Usually someone, a doctor, trying to play God, and making a human turn into zombie. The whole zombie apocalypse goes on because they kill the family of subject Zero and all that.

This movie deserves another star just cause the OST is really awesome. Seriously. I'm not going to give it one more though lol the whole thing was quite disappointing.

23. The Fall of the Usher House (Netflix series) ✅⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Okay I saw this whole series in what? Two days? The adaptation was incredibly well done. I'm aware that the story on the book is different but I quite enjoyed the show. Although it's quite graphic. So there's my trigger warning ⚠️ if anything lol honest question, do we need trigger warnings for horror movies?

Carla Gugino's still one of my unexplained crushes, she is still as beautiful as the day I saw her for the first time, does she have a fountain of eternal youth hidden somewhere? Anyway, it surprised me how good she's within the horror genre. To be honest I haven't followed her in years but now she captured my attention so I definitely will be paying attention from now on.💕

I actually screamed during Tammy's death. Her acting is truly on point. It made me feel everything that the rest of the Ushers couldn't. Considering how tired and how much I've disassociated these weeks to be able to watch horror movies every day, I think you can say she's the best of the best.

Ironically, she wasn't even my favorite character but Aunt Madeleine and Camille who I felt they were so alike. And in a way I kept admiring them. And also Lenore but for different reasons. Still I felt captivated by the whole series. Aunt Madeleine monologue is wow! But Tammy's death and the way it was presented to us, I truly felt like I was inside with her. Grieving and feeling all that. I couldn't stop watching despite how much I wanted to.

24. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein✅⭐⭐⭐

It made me jump several times 😭🤣 but I can't quite put my finger on why... maybe because it was raining while I was watching the movie. Maybe because the timing was so on point every time the lightening strikes inside the movie, the same thing happened here...

Anyway this is my first time watching Frankestein and the aesthetics are so good 😍💖 also.. Helena Bonham Carter is there!? And considering how good Kenneth Branagh was playing Gilderoy Lockhart I really found hilarious and on point sawing him play Victor Frankenstein too.

25. #Alive✅⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐

What a movie! I wonder if this is tied to Train to Busan and All of us are Dead. I mean, technically it's not. But the fandom can always take upon it and make it a thing. It has happened before lol right?? Please someone needs to make it a thing 😭 even if it's just a fanfic or something. I'll be so happy.

It keeps reminding me of coronavirus 😭

The guy is a good person but... why is he eating such a big ramen? He should be breaking it into small portions lol he really does not know anything about survival. Poor thing 😕 I shouldn't be laughing so much about it but... he's really stupid at times. If he survives it'll be a miracle lol

Oh... she's cute 🥺 kind and smart. She's going to die lol

They are so lucky to have each other. 🥺😭

Oof!

Okay... let's start counting how many times he actually screwed it off lol

Every time I think he's about to screw it off, he saves her lol and I like their dynamic so much 🥺😭 like, not really shipping them. Just, rooting for them and loving their friendship. That's a friendship right?

OMG she's so cool...

No way... see? This is why I enjoy Korean movies so much... their plot twists are insane...

🥺😭💕

26. Freaky✅⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

O.M.G. it's definitely one of the best movies I've seen in a while. Scary but original. And funny. I loved it. Great characters. Awesome development. Good acting. Made me laugh a lot and I was rooting for the heroine. But also... aw 🥺🤧 that ending... And the beginning! 😱💕

27. A nightmare on Elm Street ✅⭐⭐⭐

It's a great movie. Seriously. But I had to pause it several times because I felt sleepy... really sleepy. Which is so weird because I usually don't feel like that while watching a horror movie.

Anyway I found odd watching Johnny Depp as a kid 🤣 but I was rooting for Nancy's character all the way.

28. The Wizard of Oz ✅ ⭐⭐

Aw... cute singing...

Toto what!? 😱 Well...

I'm not sure I liked the movie lol it felt like.... why are they singing so merrily about the death of the witch!? I feel like they're so mean 😭💀

.... Did Glinda just decided to make Dorothy part of her beef against Elephie? (Ignoring the musical plot ofc) they're so mean lololol

Pretty sure lions and tigers are not part of the forest 😭🤣 okay maybe there are tigers on the rainforests. But pretty sure you won't find one... in middle of the forest. Nvm. I realize it's supposed to be a movie... sorry about that lol

Ohhh that last part when they are all together, facing their worse fears together. It's so cute.

I love the hourglass. It's red!! 😍 so pretty.... the movie is cringy lol but the songs are catchy. The red shoes are marvelous too 😍

And that's it. I don't like this movie lol but the songs are awesome.

29. Cirque du Freak ✅⭐⭐

Ken Watanabe!? Josh Hutcherson, John C. Reilly, Salma Hayek and William Dafoe!? How come I didn't watch this first!? 😭😱 looks so cool...

The intro is so long... but kind of interesting lol

I was eating... lucky me, I don't really get nauseous or sick of watching gross things. I used to watch Dr House or Hannibal when I was a kid while I was eating. That's how strong my stomach is lol

... Is it just me or Evra looks a bit like Ross Lynch here? I love Ross Lynch.... maybe that's why lol

Being honest it was below average. But I also liked it. So... the stars do not say how much, because then it'd be a 3 or 4 but the movie deserves only two.

30. Suspiria (original)✅⭐⭐⭐⭐

The aesthetics are so 😍💕

Did I mention I'm a Dario Argento fan? Okay, I'm a new fan lol like, I'm barely starting with his movies and all that, but still, he's the only one who has actually made me feel so excited and terrified at the same time. Like actually screaming and keep me horrified for several minutes. I loved Phenomena with Jennifer Connelly. Suspiria seems like a dream and a nightmare at the same time.

She looks like Lily Collins 😳

God... the aesthetics... that blue, and those walls... 😍💖

It's actually ballet! 😭😚

The music gives you an actual headache...

Are they trying to drown her!? That diet seems so... lol still... I wish there was a school like that. Minus the bloodbath ofc

lol I like how Susy prefers to sleep before spying on the teachers. I'd be pissed irl because there's nothing better than a mystery but... the movie's making me laugh a little with that. I think they're putting something on her food though.

Okay Susie's definitely taking pills to sleep, you do recognize the signs after a while... I'm surprised I didn't notice before... but Sara keeps shaking her so much it's impossible for her not to be awake unless she's on drugs 😭

Omg...

Okay... the ending was a bit disappointing. But also good? Still, that makes me like the remake a bit more. Ummm... I think I like both movies now. I'm keeping this on first place because the aesthetics and music. Some parts are dark but nothing big if you're into horror movies. Still... I think I want to watch it again because of the aesthetics. *sigh*

31. (No title. I'll be watching a movie with a friend 😚💕)

🦇✨ 🎃 ✨ 🎃 ✨ 🎃 ✨ 🎃 ✨ 🎃 ✨ 🦇

My take: I'm usually a person who likes horror movies. A lot. But... I'm so tired of them RN so I definitely took some horror movies out to make it a bit more light and that's why I ended up watching The Wizard of Oz and Cirque du Freak. And I still ended up hating them lol that's how tired I am. I'm about to puke already. Seriously. Someone please get me something else to watch lololol

I am now looking for the original books of Oz after watching Return to Oz and The Wizard of Oz (which tbh I never saw the original one until now, but several animated ones, and I always found them so creepy I could not even.)

I'm definitely not going to watch horror movies in a while. I'm so done with it. Also, this is why I was struggling so much and couldn't find another movie to make it 31 to the point I almost fall asleep with most of them. I can't feel a thing with most of them. And I love Suspiria. I'm not going to watch anything else after this movie. Not right now at least.

I did enjoy the movie with my friend. I think it's one of the best things. Just because I spent almost 2 hours with that person. That already makes everything 1000% better.

Things that I've learned:

* I hate slashers, unless they're really good or do not have so many gory details. Or it's a bit more "elegant" lol idk how to explain it, except for me liking more Hannibal than a random freak with a knife. You guys get it no?

* My favorite Halloween movies are with ghosts, but I prefer psychological thriller movies.

* I can endure religions on movies but I hate them with passion.

* Monsters are not my thing because they usually are so brainless and so are the people around them trying to kill or run away from them. Use your brain! (This is why I'm a Ravenclaw -.-)

* American zombies suck. They're slow and boring. Please do not mention to me War Z. Korean zombies are awesome and they're the only reason I started watching zombie movies 💀 I like them fast.

* I will root for the brainy and most sassiest person in the room. If this one is killed I will root for the killer.

* I don't think I'll be celebrating Halloween with horror movies next year lol but who knows right?

* The winner of this list would be: Psycho. And in second place I'd be picking Freaky cause I really enjoyed that movie.

* I'm growing less and less fond of Halloween the more time it passes (not the idea itself, death and undead will never scare me but the whole horror show puts me a bit.... off now. I'm starting to understand my own roots a bit more too like being fond of this time of the year because it ends but not because of the horror, ya know what I mean? I'm getting old I think. Or maybe I'm coming back to the person I used to be.)

* Most horror movies and series lack of character development or something that makes it attractive and lets the audience feel compelled to root for them. That's why many people started rooting for the monster. It lacks humanity. They're just bloodbaths. It's boring.

* It took me so many hours to think of my costumes, design something somewhat decent, pull all the pics and watch movies at the same time 😭 🤣 it was fun but I won't be doing this again.

* I love autumn 🍂🍁🍂

* Somehow I'm more in touch with my feelings right now.

* Some movies and series actually made me feel inspired to go back and write!

* I really, really love autumn 🍂 it's just this cozy, nostalgic feeling. I'm trying not to cry whenever I see the sunlight through the leaves. 🍁

[bettyfrommars]

hi!! i was wondering if you could give some movie, book, tv show, or fic recs for my spooky szn media list this year? a lot of the things you write are absolutely the kind of vibe that im going for, so i figured you would be the best person to ask for those kind of things. im very new to the horror genre (just stepping out of slashers and into magical realism and paranormal type things). and ofc you don’t have to, but id love to know what some of your favorite twilight zone episodes are!

no pressure to respond, you were just the first person i thought of when it came to asking recs from, since your taste seems to be the same niche that i have.

(btw im 18+ so you don’t have to worry about giving tame recs)

I love you for asking this because it gets me excited for the season and reminds me of things I need to revisit. Okay, so I'm going to start off with books because this is very important, and I love this series sooooo much this time of year. I usually re-read it or listen to the audiobooks, it's called the Pine Deep Trilogy by Jonathan Maberry (Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man's Song, and Bad Moon Rising), and it's such a fall fic you can taste the colors. It's based in a town known for its Halloween celebrations (lots of cornfields, haunted mazes, lots of actual evil lurking) There are ghouls and zombies and vampires in this and it's so thrilling, the pages will fly by.

Also these story collections by Joe Hill: Full Throttle and Strange Weather.

I do a rewatch of the show Tales from the Crypt every year, that is a staple. I'm also a sucker for anthologies like Body Bags, Creepshow, and The Monster Club. I watch a LOT of campy horror and campy slashers, most of which I'm sure you are familiar with. I was going to make a list of the b-movies and MST3K episodes I love, but I don't think that is what you are asking me for, and I don't want to get carried away and embarrass myself 💀 If you are interested in those things, pls leave another anon message and I will.

I will forever recommend the vampire series True Blood, it's iconic and I believe the first two seasons are free on Amazon Prime.

Favorite Twilight Zone episodes! I can tell I would love you in real life because you ask the best questions. Definitely "To Serve Man" that one still gives me shivers when I think about it today. "Nightmare at 20,000 feet" but I prefer the John Lithgow version in Twilight Zone: The Movie, because look at the original version, I actually feel sad for this baby:

"A Most Unusual Camera" I think that is the name of it is another one. "Will the real martian please stand up" is so good. Oh god, and "The Lonely" is another one. I used to be on the road a lot, and if you ever are, I recommend The Twilight Zone collections on audible, they are acted out like old radio show dramas.

As far as fic rec from here, I've actually been thinking about searching around for ones that have a spooky/fall vibe and doing a post about it---hopefully soon.

You are a doll, and I am so happy you reached out xoxoxoxox

[lighthouseborn]

does he have or wear a necklace like that in his fantasy verse? or any of his other verses too?

Hi hello yes very good question!! Thank you for asking it! & I hope you wanted an essay because I have an essay for you. And it starts with me backtracking! If you only wanted a literal answer to this, skip down a few paragraphs to the part where I repeat the question.

So, [the necklace] is obviously very important to Henry, but it's also (to me, anyway) very important as an indication of Henry. I've always maintained that he is lucky. You could absolutely argue this as a narrative necessity or narrative symbol, and I think those are also true, but I also think he is, diegetically, within the realm of his story, a lucky person.

This is actually vindicated in Jeff N.athanson's draft of the script, where a proto-Henry (then a navy sailor called Henry Maddox) directly claims that he is lucky several times.

As well, the proto-Salazar (then Captain Brand) and Captain Barbossa both refer to this Henry as "lucky" in the context of being chosen not to die at the ghosts' hands and surviving the wreck of the Monarch.

And while that's all the literal uses of the word, there are several instances where the unlikely takes place and Henry just waltzes right though the whole thing. Not completely unscathed, mind you, just with an uncanny ability to get himself out of things. So we can assume the script really really wants you know that this kid is, for some reason, genuinely the luckiest guy in the Caribbean. He even survives the final fight by pure chance and good timing, despite being stabbed by a witch. (It's. Layered, how we got to 'Henry got stabbed by a witch'. In this version the Shansa character (then called Melia) gets more to do and Scarfield is the one possessed by Brand-flavored Salazar, also Carina is twenty-nine, and at one point several sailors gets eaten by large carnivorous plants. It's all very involved. Don't worry about it.)

Now: obviously this is not H.enry Tur.ner. But also, in a very real way, he very much is, in the sense that Hen.ry Turn.er as we got him was more or less directly transposed on top of this character, down to meeting a Barbossa in the infirmary on Saint Martin. Nathanson's first(?) draft of this script very much gives the early layout and elements of the movie we actually see - more or less the only carryover from the R.ossio "Dea.d Men Tell No T.ales" script is the name and the mention of Poseidon's Trident. And, I guess, a witch. So what is my point? Aha! My point is: while canon!Henry as we get him never directly claims to be, or is directly described as, lucky, the fact remains that a majority of his character is founded in a character-concept that was very deliberately & intentionally created to be lucky. And so while no one ever points directly at it, we still get things like:

he is the only survivor of the Monarch

he survives paddling "all the way to Saint Martin against the tide on a piece of drift wood" (insane)

he stumbles on Jack, the very man he is looking for, entirely by chance - further, after being pointed to Saint Martin by a captured pirate who just happens to know this

he ambushes the hanging square entirely unarmed*, and walks away without a scratch** despite most of his opponents being trained soldiers/naval officers

just in general escapes harm time and time again with a little bit of stalling and a lot of spectacular timing.

*There is a goof in various shots where he does, actually, have a sword in his belt, however he never draws it and in a majority of the shots, it isn't there. As well, both the novelization of the film and the companion novel which explores more of Carina's story (which are presumably based on the final script, though I have no concrete copy of the final script to confirm this) specifically note that he is unarmed.

from the novelization by Elizabeth Rudnick

from The Brightest Star in the North by Meredith Rusu (this one is the better book of the two, btw)

**A couple of punches from some navy men, and Carina more or less knees him in the chest when he catches her, but neither of these things are brought up again. Personally I think he probably cracked a rib or something, but that's a different conversation about the (lack of) realism and consequences when brawling in action-adventure movies. ((Stop smashing people over the head with things for a 'mild' take down. That kills and severely injures people for life.))

Ok so he's lucky- what does that have to do with the necklace? Aha!! So the entire thing with [the necklace] is that it is composed of good luck charms; objects literally, figuratively, and in general have the shape of good will and hope that good things find him, right? Right, but also wrong. Because the entire thing with the necklace is actually the symbolism.

For his young developmental years, Henry had (we infer just... by the general shape and implied access to learning materials (he can read, write, has many stories and facts about pirate captains memorized)) a stable and reliable home. He also had, implied by the final (it's mid or post credits, I believe?) scene of At Worl.d's End, meeting his father to look forward to, in some capacity. Whether he knew all his life or was told shortly before is entirely up in the air, but what we do know is Elizabeth and then-unamed Henry go to the shore to meet Will there. DMTNT tells us that within a couple of years* of this meeting, Henry was frustrated and dissatisfied enough with their situation after this meeting that it has driven him to research and obsession. Obsession, because it has consumed him to the point of him beliving tying a net of rocks to his ankle in order to sink himself onto the Flying Dutchm.an is a perfectly reasonable course of action.

*The age Henry is when he pulls his net-full-of-rocks trick varies(?) by source. In the novelization, he is labeled as twelve years old, and the main story takes place seven years later, making him nineteen. In the movie, the setting notation reads "nine years later" as we transition to the main story, and -presuming Henry is still nineteen- this means he was ten (and that the opening scene may be another facet of DMTNT being a soft reboot, thereby replacing the post-credit scene of the third movie.) Or, that he was twelve at the time, and twenty-one in the main body of the story. It's all very potayto-potahto. Either way he's still a kid so sure of his beliefs and of his faith in his family he staked his literal life on it. Absolutely out of his mind in the best possible way.

After this, Henry has a new goal, a new core drive, and, while maybe not literally speaking, in a certain way he has a new identity. He sinks himself onto his father's ship and gets nothing but a "leave me" and a necklace for his efforts. He then, no matter how you approach this story, spends a majority of his formative preteen and teen years obsessed with the concept of freeing his father, specifically via the trident of Poseidon. This is all he has been doing. Whatever life he has been living, everything in terms of his future ambitions, everything he has been striving toward is wrapped up in this effort. The original necklace -if it ever was just a necklace to Will, we really don't know what it meant to him- ceases to be a necklace and becomes Henry's ambition, and, in a very real way, Henry's identity. (The same way the journal(/ruby) is Carina's.)

So for the next years, Henry is this one necklace, figuratively speaking. It's what's been pushing him to do a vast majority of what he does. So then, at the end of the story, when he hands this necklace back to his father.... what does that leave him? He has handed himself over to this quest in so many ways, and hands the symbol of what it has made of him away in his final scene. Obviously this is a good thing. It also begs the question: without this identity driving him, who is Henry? (Who is Carina?)

So. Enter the new necklace. [The necklace] in question is a gift. It is, as mentioned, made of luck charms and gifts of memory and kindness and good will and affection. It is an anchor, a line thrown to him after he finds himself suddenly unbound, suddenly adrift. And it is, again, Henry himself. Henry is the lucky thing, the myth-touched, the love, the loved. Which, finally, yes, brings me to the actual question:

Does he have the necklace in every verse? And I do realize it was probably being asked in a strictly practical and physical way. I know that very simply "does he always rattle like a weird wind chime?" is what was being asked of me and I could have answered it that way, but that leaves out the context in so many ways that I wanted to talk about it before I talked about it. Because the necklace is more than a necklace. Now that I have made that abundantly clear we can talk about:

In a literal sense, no. He does not always have that specific necklace. He does, very often, have luck charms and/or guiding symbols.

Its one of his little quirks of character that carries around with him verse to verse, he's interested in folk legend and symbols and charms. He collects them. This is often multi-fold; in his blog-canon verses, he just collects objects said to be attached to or bound with magic and curses in general, not just lucky items. In his modern verse(s), he is or was studying folklore as part of his university major, and so things like that tend to collect when you're essaying and thesis-ing on highly specific subjects. (I'm not legitimately essaying on folklore I'm just writing about someone who is and I have bought no less than four but really kind of a bigger number I don't want to say different folklore books in the last couple years. The nerd urge to collect is real. (And despite what various fandom takes and the tvtropes page would have you believe, Henry is very much not a simple idiot, and very clearly a research fiend. Just. A research fiend who can also send navy officers down like they're made of paper.))

You singled out his fantasy verse- I would say this is the one most likely for him to have something very nearly if not exactly the same, yes! The exact charms might be a little different, especially considering the fantasy verse is sort of a jumping-off point for several more specific concepts of him, depending on the world I want the fantasy verse to match, but he probably has a necklace-o-junk in most versions of that verse.

Modern, I don't think he has one necklace, but I'm sure he has a few charms and baubles on necklaces, yeah. He has less need of a physical token in that verse in general, though. Well... actually maybe not less need of it, but the tokenization aspect of it is not the same, because his relationship with his father is very different in that verse. I don't know that he ever was given an object to latch onto in the same fashion, so the symbol language around the whole thing changes. This is also a verse where the things Henry does to get his father back take a very real toll from his actual physical body. He doesn't just hand a necklace back and lose his purpose by winning, he is badly injured and scarred and changed; very literally gives himself over to this goal. His future is also much more uncertain in that verse, right now. He's in a wandering stage, he's lacking a little bit of direction. Still very him, but... hasn't quite found a thing to aim at. The writing thing works for him, for now.

Descendants verse... I go back and forth. I've shuffled a lot of things around in that verse since I started it. And some of it stays really close to canon, while a whole bunch of it is also very very different, and it just. I'm never sure. I'm never sure about a lot of things, in this verse, to be honest. Part of that also comes with I've lost a few of the writers I had plotted things with and now I waffle on whether to keep all of them or sort some of them back out for the sake of more firmly defining the events of this verse. I can tell you it's entirely possible he has an identical version of the necklace, here. All the elements it would take for it are technically present. However, he also has different dynamics, and additional dynamics that don't exist in his home verses. I think... he's got something, here. And it might be more like modern, where he's got a few things and not just one necklace he wears all the time, or it might be something more singular I haven't identified yet. But I think he's got a little more need to have that... multi-direction anchor. A piece of here, a piece of there, this and that he would want to carry and keep close.

In his D:BH verse, the most analogous thing to the necklace is actually a tattoo. This verse technically riffs off of the modern verse, and so the literal physical tolls apply here, but what also happened was, when getting him into this world, I needed a thing to point him at. And what happened to point him that way wound up taking a shape that sort of mirrors his general arc but with specific fandom elements and so he's... really Henry if he lost his way and purpose twice. And so he's actually really very...aimless in this verse, in a different way than just not knowing where he's going next. He's tied himself to this one place, instead, so there's not literal going, but he has no clue where he's going with himself, here. He's got some things he needs to unpack but I'm not sure I even know what those things are or how to unpack them. There's a very real grief attached to him in the D:BH verse and the tattoo, the necklace of this verse, is driving him. And also possibly dragging him down, actually. I'm not sure.... the tattoo is a good thing for him to be aiming at. It does good - he does good, there. But I don't know if it's a good thing for him. Maybe he needs to get fired, hmm.

In the sense that he is the necklace because the necklace is him, is who he is? Well. He's very lucky to have who he has, is what I will say.

[catchingbigfish]

oc name meaning tag game

ooooooh this is an interesting game, thanks for the tag @dotr-rose-love! (sorry @ everyone whose tag games i missed pretty much the entire month of march btw, i know i'll never get to catch up on them but might work through a few that look immediately doable at some point) i'm tagging @nanashi23, @inkspellangel, @linaket, @pga-books, and @ls-daydreams!

rules: list OCs and explain the meaning of their names

i tend to pick names based on the vibe i have for the character -- i have strooooong associations with various vowel combinations, or arrangement of letters, or pairings, etc., so most of this is just "idk it sounded cool". but because i love the idea of this game so much, i'm going to do it for every WIP i have rn:

so it goes

Marisa: i wanted a name that ended with an A because names like that make me think of someone sincere and serious

Isaiah: i wanted a biblical name; i associate those with families with deep lineages and a strong matriarch for some reason, which was a quality i wanted Isaiah to have

Ali: i wanted a name that complemented marisa's because they were sisters in the original draft, and i feel like L's and S's complement each other nicely. her full name is Alison, but i wanted her to be someone fun and outgoing, and Ali feels like that more than Alison

Paige: i got stuck on her name and picked a name from a random generator -- for some reason, when i see the name Paige, i instantly think of a girl who is aesthetically similar to the character (whose description is inspired by Gillian Jacobs)

Henry: another random generator produced this one -- i wanted it to be a very common man's name that wouldn't provoke much interest

Sophia: she's not a main character but i fucking love the name sophia/sofia so much. it's probably my favorite ever girl's name. it means wisdom and in some schools of gnosticism it was the emanation of god that was paired with Christ and unintentionally caused the world to exist

the space between pomegranate seeds

Meredith: i wanted a name that felt like the weird religious girl everyone knew growing up, but wasn't super cliche like Chastity lol

(most of the other characters are purposefully unnamed)

decomposing gods - priestess of bones

Claire: when i originally came up with this story idea i was deep into my Early Cronenberg Period (end of 2021) and had just rewatched Dead Ringers. i knew there would be a trio of women, so i gave them the names from the movie as placeholders: Claire, Bev, and Elly. i chose Claire for the documentarian because i felt the name fit her personality/vibe best, a diminutive brunette intent to prove herself

Bev: as above. i originally wanted to go Bev/Elly for the documentarian and camera person's roles, but realized they didn't fit right. also frankly i always categorized this as a lesbian name in my head for some reason, which worked out best since the character is queer

Sofia: even though i felt like Claire and Bev fit well with the characters i also never intended to actually use the trio's name. Sofia as a filmmaker is actually most inspired by Julia Ducournau, but i do love Sofia Coppola, lol.

bilocation

Emily: the real person she is based on is Émilie Sagée, and i didn't want to trick myself into not writing this by deciding to do research on the historical period she's from (1800s latvia), so i americanized her name and placed it in a 1980s boarding school in oregon but retained the formal speaking voice i'd imagined for her

Ms. Frond: i honestly went with the first word that popped into my brain on this -- i have so many characters named after the most bizarre shit because i'll use anything for a last name that pops into my head. i love it, though, because Emily becomes obsessed with her and has an established fascination with plants

Roland: i wanted a name that felt like a surprise on the groundskeeper character -- he looks like a dude who would be named something like Biff or Johnson or something, but he becomes a much more tender and gentle character than you anticipate from the description